Signature Worldwide developed into top customer-service trainer

Talk with Signature Worldwide principals Don Farrell and Steve Wolever, and it becomes clear they are at opposite ends of the personality spectrum.

Farrell is a gregarious, fast-talking salesman at heart. He is full of funny stories and quips honed during his years of working the sales circuit for Signature, a Dublin-based company whose core business is customer service and sales training programs for the hotel industry. Wolever is a more reserved, analytical type, skilled at breaking down and solving complex business problems.

But both say their different styles and strengths are two of the reasons they have been able to build Signature into an international company with 260 employees and revenue expected to hit $13.5 million this year.

It has grown from its roots in the hospitality business to serve industries such as automotive, education, aviation, financial services, multifamily housing and health care.

"You might say we're opposites," said Farrell, who founded the company in 1986, "but a lot of times, we come to the same conclusion, just from different focuses. We can put our egos in our back pockets and do whatever it takes."

"We're a counterbalance," Wolever said. "It works."

He and Farrell also agree that Wolever's wife, Becky, has been crucial to Signature's success in her role as chief operating officer. Both call her the conscience of the company and key to a corporate culture that practices the customer-service mantra Signature preaches to it clients.

"I like to think our culture starts as a marketing thing," Farrell said, "and we've grown our success on what our clients see when they look at us. If for any reason there is a problem, we get our butts back in there and fix it for free. If they're still unhappy, we give them back every penny they paid us."

Getting started

Farrell and the Wolevers have built Signature into one of the top providers of customer-service training in the hospitality industry, said Amir Eylon, executive vice president of the Ohio Hotel and Lodging Association.

Such training is critical, he said, if a hotel chain wants its brand to be known as much for its customer service as its amenities and facilities.

"It's always been important to provide super service," Eylon said, "but it's even more so in this day and age. There's so much competition. The service component can really be the key difference for a (hotel). Guests may not remember the type of room they had, but they will remember the guest experience."

Farrell and Wolever said they learned that during the years they spent in hotel management before joining forces at Signature 15 years ago.

Farrell rose to executive-level sales positions with two hotel operators, Inn America and Flautt Properties, after getting his start in his teenage years as a pot scrubber in a hotel kitchen. While with Flautt, he met Wolever, who had been hired as general manager of one of the company's hotels in Memphis, Tenn.

"The more we worked together," Farrell said, "the more I liked him. He is a guy who can take an extremely complex problem that takes me 20 minutes to explain and come back with a solution in six words."

Tired of working for companies that lacked his belief in doing "the right things in the right way," Farrell launched Signature as a one-man consulting firm in 1986.

He said he had success selling the customer-service and sales training he provided to hotels, building a waiting list of clients, but he needed help with nuts-and-bolts business issues such as finance and operations. In 1991, he asked his old friend Wolever, who was general manager at the Hilton Inn in Worthington, to become his business partner.

"It was no fun doing it alone," Farrell said. "Steve came in to run the business side. He did everything. All I did was sell."

One of the lessons the two learned, Wolever said, was customer service and sales training programs only work if they were reinforced by follow-up services. That includes periodic site visits by trainers, telephone coaching of employees and mystery shopping calls to hotels by Signature to check on how well hotel employees are using what they are taught in training sessions.

Introduced in 1995, those reinforcement services remain at the core of the company's training programs today, Wolever said.

That year was the same year Signature got its first big contract - a deal to provide sales and customer-service training to 575 Hampton Inn properties. The company had to ramp up quickly, growing from six employees to 20 almost overnight. Many of those hired were friends Becky Wolever had made at church, Farrell said.

"Right after we made the deal, there were absolutely no growing pains," he said. "Becky and those guys had it beat. We saw we could make big deals."

The Hampton deal also required the Wolevers to move the business from their Dublin home to some back-office space off Sawmill Road. Today, the company leases 33,000 square feet in an office building off Tuttle Crossing Boulevard.

"We had the only house in Dublin with 56 phone lines," Steve Wolever said. "It was pretty hilarious. I think the neighbors thought we were bookies."

Signature's steady growth came to a halt after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks devastated the travel industry, he said. As a result, Signature lost 30 percent of its clients within 60 days. The company laid off five workers. Pay cuts of 10 percent for employees and 18 percent for senior management were implemented.

Business began to turn around in 2002 when Best Western Inns hired Signature to provide on-site training to workers at 4,000 of its hotels. That allowed Signature to award bonuses that helped employees recoup the money they had lost through pay cuts, Wolever said.

Also in 2002, Signature responded to requests for its services from some of its international hotel clients by signing the first overseas licensee - Brazilian entrepreneur Carlos Aldan - for its products. Today, it has seven licensees covering 45 countries.

"We found for the long term that a national (licensee) can do so much better than we could as Americans in a foreign country," Wolever said. 'They put our curriculum in their language and fit it into their culture."

Signature has also taken its training and marketing programs to businesses ranging from truck dealers to health spas. Non-hotel companies account for about 25 percent of Signature's business, Wolever said.

Two of the keys to the company's growth, he said, has been its reluctance to go into debt to expand and what he called its narrow focus on its core business.